There was enough gasoline pooled around her for a funeral pyre, but my lighter was gone. I fumbled around in my pockets.
“This is taking too long, Colin.”
“Yeah, I know. She could be back any second. She’s probably taking the baby back to the den and then coming for me with a vengeance.”
Looking at the ruins of my Dorothy, that sounded all right; millennia-old nursing mother or not, the bitch was going to pay for this.
“Not if we die first. Here, let me speed this up.”
I felt my right hand wave, watched it happen more as a spectator than an actor. A surge of power went out through my palm. The puddles under the car began to spit out black smoke as pale green flames appeared at the edges. The energy expenditure made me feel dizzy, light-headed, but I was still aware of the growing heat as the flames rapidly spread.
“Can’t pass out on me yet. We’ve got to get out of here.”
I had a vague sensation of walking, stumbling, as my battered body moved away from Dorothy’s pyre. Then the pain and exhaustion caught up with me and everything went black.
2
I
won’t detail my escape from the park last night, largely because I couldn’t remember it. I assumed it was long, but uneventful, because it was nearly noon by the time I woke up in my hotel room. Going to Mass was out, but at least I was alive and in one piece. My head throbbed dully, but I didn’t feel any unexpected bumps or bruises. In fact, given my certainty that I had dislocated a shoulder last night, I felt pretty damn good. My left arm was slightly tender from where the wendigo landed on my dagger, but I had most of my mobility and the pain was not full-blown frostbite. A couple of Excedrin down the hatch might be enough to get me up and running at full speed.
Waking up went faster after I saw what was on the pillow next to me. The black leather of the Necronomicon was open, its yellowed folio pages casually settled to a page that was mercifully free of illustrations or sketches. I quickly checked behind every door and inside every piece of furniture, then checked them all again before I was satisfied I was alone in the room. I tried to ignore the writing on the open pages, but couldn’t help seeing the title of the essay on “Manipulating the Color and Shape of Space and Time” etched at the top. I closed the book and stuffed it in the bottom dresser drawer, opposite a well-worn Gideon’s Bible. It was not the first time that memory loss and that damnable tome had been paired. The aftermath of previous occurrences made this one all the more frightening.
I shoveled back a handful of Excedrin, far more than what was strictly necessary for my minor league headache. I wanted to partake in the holy sacraments more than ever, but it was too late in the day for a morning Mass. I considered finding a phone book to see if I could come up with an evening service. Beyond that, the day was a blank slate. I doubted many stores or public buildings would be open on Sunday this deep in the Bible belt. People were probably still at church for a potluck supper or at home watching football. October is still football season, right?
The idea of “at home” caught in my head as my eyes landed on the packet of stuff I had requested from Lucien. There was one person in this state I wanted to be at home today, though I doubted she was much of a churchgoing, pigskin fan. Sitting around trying not to think about what I was doing with the Necronomicon last night was not likely to be productive, but finding her would do wonders for my sense of security. I grabbed the pendant necklace I had bought at Gaea’s Treasures and the woman’s letter to Valente and got busy. Object reading wasn’t my specialty, but I had a luck-based tracking spell that was fairly decent. A severed wendigo head might convince her that she was in over her head and that it was time to call off the curse.
I doubted it though. From the angry, hateful, caustic tone of her letter, I doubted she cared. She wanted Lucien to suffer and didn’t really care if she had to die for that to happen. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to oblige her. Killing a cannibal ice demon was one thing; killing a woman, even a demented, insane one who riled up ancient demons, was another thing entirely. But even if she did call it off Valente International…the wendigo and I would still have business to settle. The mother wasn’t going to forgive the death of the father and the scent of Dorothy’s funeral pyre still stung in my nostrils. I might be able to get Valente out of this, but I was staying all in.
3
A
fter an early afternoon breakfast, I started walking out towards the lake. The tracking spell was primed and ready. The lake was a good distance away and the wendigoes’ lair was on the far side, so I hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. I wanted to wait until I was a lot closer before I started pumping energy into the necklace. On top of that, I was still in the “city” and I’m not much for following around a pendant in public—at best, it gets me weird looks, at worst, somebody will come along with a torch and a rope.
What I really needed was a new set of wheels, since otherwise I had one very long walk ahead of me. I stopped by an ATM, drew out my daily limit, then went with one of my better tricks. I figured I had earned a little good karma and it probably wouldn’t kill me to take out a line of credit on a luck spell. I closed my eyes and focused on the result I had in mind, me sitting behind the steering wheel. “Father, I could use a little luck here. Show me the way to go so that what you want can happen. Amen.” Not exactly high magic, I grant, but it had helped me before in the past. Luck magic is dangerous if you don’t invoke a greater being to govern it.
No voice thundered out of Heaven and no cars fell from the sky, so I started walking again. This kind of spell was subtle: no flash, no kaboom. It would work, though, provided I paid attention to whatever help Heaven offered. I had gone five blocks before a sign caught my eye: Redwind Drive. Not many street signs spell out words like avenue, boulevard, or drive. I took that as my sign and hooked a left on to Redwind Drive.
The road twisted off to the right through a slice of modern suburbia. The houses were nice, but not luxurious. A few people were out mowing their lawns, quite possibly for the last time until spring. A pair of kids were playing with a large dog, though I couldn’t quite make out who was chasing who. I wandered slowly forward, keeping my eyes open, without looking like a burglar casing a job. The street went on like this for fifteen minutes. I was starting to feel like I had missed something when I saw her.
An older man stood in his driveway, bent over the hood of a midnight blue 1964 Ford Mustang. From the way his elbow was pumping, he must have been polishing a blemish out of the wax. It couldn’t have been a very big flaw; she practically beamed in the afternoon sun. I strolled closer before calling out, “She’s beautiful, sir.”
The man turned and grinned, a gray mustache above his lip. “Thank you.” He looked around at the other yards. “At least, I assume you mean the car. Never know when one of those neighbor girls is going to get it in their head to sunbathe.”
“Even if there was a girl, she’d have to be quite a looker to compare to a first production year Mustang.”
He cocked his head, a hint of frustration creeping over him. “My nephew posted that ad? I told him I didn’t want to sell her that way. Internet, bah.”
I laughed, wondering just how much good karma I’d spent on this one. I looked up and down the street to make sure there were no buses heading my direction. “No, sir, no Internet, just a Ford man. She’s…well, I’m sure I’ve never seen one in such good shape.”
“Well, that she is. I always wanted one when I was young. Couldn’t afford her till I was well past the middle of the road. Probably for the best. How anyone survives to be older than twenty-one, I’ll never know. I would’ve wrapped her around a tree when I was a kid.”
I walked up the driveway to get a better look. “That would have been a shame…both for her and the tree. A car like that can give an oak a run for its money.”
“That’s true. She’s all-American steel.” He wiped his hands on the edge of the towel before extending his right hand. “Steve Daniels.”
We shook. “Colin Fisher.” If he wasn’t worried about giving me his name, I wasn’t worried, either. “Ad? You’re not thinking of selling her, are you?”
“I’m afraid so. My wife and I are moving. Costa Rica. Beautiful place, but not for her. They drive like maniacs down there…and tax you a fortune to import an American car.”
I started to reach out to pet her, then thought better of it. “You mind?”
He nodded. “Not at all.” His eyes stayed on me as I ran my hand along the edge of her frame. My nerves were electric at the connection. There was luck and then there was Luck. I did a double-check in the sky for any signs of falling asteroids.
“You sure you didn’t come about an ad?”
“I’m sure. I’m in the market, but…” I hesitated. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just prayed for help in finding a car.”
His eyes stayed hard on me, then relaxed. “That’s where you’re wrong. I think I do believe it. I’ve been asking God to show me the right person to sell her to. I can’t stand the thought of someone driving her who doesn’t love her the way I do. Do you need her, Mr. Fisher, or just want her?”
“Need. My Dorothy…I mean, my old car…was stolen.” I didn’t care for lying to the man, but, a believer in prayer or not, trashed by supernatural beasties was probably more than his belief, or his heart, could handle.
He nodded. “How much can you afford?”
“I’ve got five thousand on me. Whatever else you want, I can get when the banks open tomorrow.” It wasn’t a great car-buying strategy to issue a blank check, but I was in love. Dorothy was family, like an old aunt who could cuss and talk about new movies, but still knew how to bake cookies and make chicken soup. The Mustang was more like the head cheerleader in high school.
“Five thousand will be just fine. I’m not one to argue with God.” He pulled a leather keychain from his pocket. “You want to take her for a test drive first?”
I smiled and pulled out my wallet. “I’m not much for arguing with God, either. If you say she runs, that’s good enough for me.”
We spent another half-hour looking her over. Steve showed me what he had done and what he thought might need to be done next and when. We swapped car stories, signed the title over, and fawned over her. As I was getting ready to leave, he asked, “What are you going to call her?”
“What did you call her?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. She probably means something different to you than she did to me.”
I couldn’t very well call her Dorothy; not only was that name taken, it was too old for her. Never mind that this car was twenty-two years older than Dorothy, the Mustang was eternally young. That though made me think about the dog-eared paperback I had read while working at the renaissance fair in Georgia. I’m probably the geekiest man alive for reading science fiction while pretending to be a medieval court wizard, but the name from Heinlein’s book fit. “Dora. Adorable Dora.”
4
I
don’t know how “adorable” she was, but she certainly handled like a spaceship. I thought the V8 in Dorothy was powerful, but Dora was at least a couple hundred pounds lighter with an even bigger engine. At five grand, I had gotten a bargain. I drove back to my hotel, loaded up a few extra things into the car, and took off for the vicinity of the lake.
I mostly behaved myself until I got off the Interstate. I had the country road between I-40 and the lake to myself and used the open space to put Dora through her paces. Truth be told, she put my driving skills to the test. She was everything I could handle and then some. I closed the gap between Interstate and gas station in under five minutes.
Rather than going the rest of the way to the lake, I pulled off into a back corner of the honky-tonk bar’s gravel parking lot. I activated the waiting spell I had started earlier on the pendant necklace, then hung it around Dora’s rearview mirror. As expected, the pendant leaned slightly toward the southeast. I took the road going east from the gas station, now at speeds within both reason and law. Every time a side road turned off to the right, I glanced up at the pendant, trying to judge if it was pointing more east or south.
I was driving for a half-hour at least before I decided to head south. I might have taken the turn before that one, but the road was dirt only and I wasn’t eager to get Dora dirty just yet. She was far too pretty for off-road mudding. The one I turned on was gravel, but it looked like fairly well maintained gravel. I followed it for ten minutes before the surrounding woods began to peter out. I stopped at an old hippie commune…or at least, I guessed that’s what it used to be. The man who met me at the entrance said it was a drug rehab center. From the way he talked, he suspected I was either a potential client or a connection trying to supply one of his current patients. I told him my only addiction was Middle Eastern oil and thumbed back at Dora. I think that relaxed him a little bit. I told him I was trying to find an old Native American friend, but had lost the directions she had given me. I don’t know if he completely bought it, but he was helpful enough to point out the way to a place he thought she might be.
When I climbed behind the steering wheel, I thought I knew where I was going. That should have been a warning sign of impending doom, but I figured I was safe—it was still warm and sunny out. As I continued south, if I ever noticed the motorcycle in the distance behind me, I didn’t process that it had been following me for quite a while now.
5
F
ollowing the directions from the drug counselor, I found the Old Ways compound. It too looked like it might once have been a hippie commune, but its residents had been more fervent in redecorating. It didn’t look like anything out of a John Wayne movie, but I was certain it was authentic Native American style that had been superimposed upon the original structures. A wooden sign out front simply said, “Old Ways,” bracketed between two different tribal mandalas.